Digital Cowboy

I was tagged

I don’t normally play these games, but…

• I like this guy. He makes me laugh.
• I haven’t updated this blog in a while.
• This one’s open – no specific questions – just 8 odd facts.

I can do that. Buckle up. Here we go…

Wait. They have to be odd and they have to be factual? Maybe this is harder than I thought. Either/or is easy. Odd and factual both is a challenge.

1. Despite what my critics would like to believe, I really am a “digital cowboy”. I live on a working ranch and make my main living – for now – doing web development.
2. At the moment, I’m a single father of two young daughters. Not only did I choose them, I flushed the rest of my life at the time and spent tens of thousands to “achieve” it. (And I have no regrets. Nothing has ever cost me more or been a bigger bargain.)
3. I taught myself to program on an Apple IIc in 1983.
4. I escaped lower middle class without college degrees. I currently own two businesses and I’m developing a third. I’ve never been in a college class.
5. My IQ qualifies me for – at the very least – Mensa but I’m not a member because I’m not impressed.
6. I believe the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God. This is putting it a bit lightly for the purposes of public consumption. If you have a quibble, it’s you… or more likely, the stupid religion that messed you up.
7. I fear nothing.
8. I have a craving to experience the best of everything this life has to offer. I’ve experienced much of it and found it lacking. I’ve come back to biblical principles and Kingdom life as aspirations.

There. That’s eight. I don’t know if they’re all odd, but they’re all factual. That’s me in eight easy points.

No, wait. Here’s a ninth, bonus one. I want you to have the whole picture.

9. I’m a true, pure anarchist. I have no need or use for government and I believe that’s true for most rational, decent people. Men were never intended, nor are they capable of, ruling over other men. All government is then unethical and immoral. Irrational, indecent people would be subjugated by force as opposed to the current system that works in the opposite, where the worst among us are elevated to authority – the only currently “justified” use of unprovoked force. Anyone who seeks to rule over others is fundamentally evil simply because they seek permission to use unprovoked violent force. Thus, all government is a perversion of natural order.

Here is the message I sent to Progressive Insurance after a recent attempt to use their web site:

I came to your web site today with the intention of purchasing an auto insurance policy. I thought of Progressive first because of the TV commercials about how everything could be handled online.

Unfortunately, I can’t do business with you because your web site is broken. As a web developer myself, I can see that your site has been developed to work only with Internet Explorer. That was obvious to me, even before I saw your ridiculous compatibility warning, by the astounding amount of errors running up in Firebug’s Javascript validator at the bottom of my browser. (Do you really require IE 6?!?! Just one, out-dated browser?)

Internet Explorer itself is broken by design and only lazy or incompetent developers build to it. Quality web sites are developed to standards and then, because good business sense dictates accomodating as many platforms as possible, they are retrofitted with the hacks necessary to make them work even with poor quality browsers such as Explorer.

Obviously you are free to run your business as you see fit just as I am free to go elsewhere for my insurance. I would suggest you consider fixing your web site, though. It makes good business sense because with IE 7, Microsoft has once again demonstrated that not even Microsoft products are compatible with Microsoft products. It’s a costly and unnecessary moving target to develop to their intentionally corrupted specifications and with no benefit whatsoever except to Microsoft. In addition, IE is fundamentally insecure making it down right irresponsible to use it on the web. The world is waking up to this and the Internet Explorer market share is on the decline. This is why the U.S. Department of Transportation has banned all upgrades of Microsoft desktop products including Explorer, as just one recent example.

For the record, I have an old junky Win XP machine purely for the purposes of testing the necessary hacks to make my otherwise standard web sites work with IE. But I won’t use that junk just to deal with you.

It might also be wise to consider that for every person like me who feels strongly enough about this to tell you, there are probably 10 that will just move on and wonder why your web site is the only one they encountered today that doesn’t work.

The reference I made to the number of errors in Firebug – 153 and still counting on their main page when I finally found the “Contact Us” button.

I received a form letter reply that began “Our developers are aware that our web site does not currently work with (Firefox/Mac/Safari)…” It pointed out that the site is “optimized” for IE 6 and AOL and then droned on for three insulting paragraphs describing – in condescending detail – all of their “extraordinary” security – which amounts to the same web standard SSL encryption used at every ecommerce site on the AOLIntarweb. The first thing that went through my mind is that their silly opening sentence left out “(Navigator/ Linux/ Konqueror/ Opera/ Windows Vista/ Most of Windows XP/ Internet Explorer 5/ Internet Explorer 7/ OmniWeb/ Camino/ Flock/ iCab/ Epiphany/ All mobile platforms…)”

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that they assume smart people are not their target demographic so they don’t bother with anything but last year’s Microsoft browser and AOL. Fair enough. They have plenty of competitors.

Also of note is that I don’t even need to go in the other room and turn on the XP machine to use IE 6; I have multiple options for running it right here on my MacBook Pro (in addition to Parallels or Boot Camp) and sometimes do. But I won’t, for them, for the same reason. And technically, according to them, my XP machine wouldn’t even work because it’s running IE 7 and Microsoft provides no easy way to revert to IE 6. (I suspect the Progressive site probably works in other versions of IE including 7, but that’s not the point.)

Take note budding web billionaires. This is not how you run an online business.

Live comment preview is now working in the pop-up comments. Try it out. It’s pretty slick. It gives you real time preview of your text, including tags. It can handle links (a href), ordered or unordered lists and blockquotes in addition to the more common bold (strong) and italic (em). It will even update as you modify text or tags in content you’ve already typed.

It’s been available in the traditional, embedded comments form here for a long time but I never got around to getting it working for the popups until now. That’s thanks to a complaint from one of my favorite readers that she was getting Javascript errors with every key stroke.

I think this will solve part of her problem, though a much better solution would be to use Firefox. Granted, in this case, the root cause was broken code on my site but a decent browser would handle that much more gracefully. There’s still a layout problem because IE 6 doesn’t handle floats right and I tend to not pay much attention to that (to my own detriment unfortunately) when writing style sheets.

Internet Exploder sucks more than most Microsoft stuff and that’s saying something. (I find myself saying that about more and more Microsoft products these days. I forget what the original standard of Microsoft suckage was. Maybe I need to start a “Bottom 10 list” to keep track of which MS products are worst.)

The MS fanboys say IE 7 is much better than IE 6. That’s probably true; it would be hard not to be. The problem is that in typical Microsoft fashion, they’re now more standards compliant but not really standards compliant. At the same time, now that they’re pretending to get with the program, they’re not compatible with the IE 6 specific hacks anymore either. So it’s just a new, different set of problems. Now they’re not fully compatible with the standards or sites that were specifically designed to accommodate the brokenness of IE 6.

(By the way, IE 7 is coming any day now and will be pushed through Windows Update. Don’t be surprised if half of the “interweb” is “broken” for a while after you install it. Almost everything you see correctly in IE 6 only works because the page is specifically hacked to work with IE 6. Millions upon millions of style sheets will have to be rewritten and retested to make them work with IE 7.)

It reminds me of the old cliche, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” In Microsoft’s case, the answer is, “When we need to renew the revenue stream or protect our control.”

On a related note, last Sunday I got an email complaint about the text being too small on voxday.net. I get one of those every couple of months. In this case, the tone of the email seemed slightly snarky and, worse, it caught me first thing in the morning before I had my coffee. I wasn’t even happy to be alive yet on that particular day so I was a little more obnoxious than normal in my reply:

The type face is only too small if you are using Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer is a broken browser that doesn’t support web standards. Vox and I made the decision to leave the site as is in order to remind folks like you that Internet Explorer is not only a poor browser, it’s also a menace to the internet because of its plethora of security problems that spread worms and viruses.

Voxday.net is perfectly legible in either Firefox or Opera. If you insist on using Internet Explorer, even that poorly coded excuse for software can be made to render it properly by changing its default font size.

On commercial, for-profit sites, I accommodate Microsoft’s incompetence and terrorist market behavior. With voxday.net I have the luxury of ignoring their stupidity.

Mark

I will apologize to Bob for my snarky tone and really should “fix” (read: “hack”) voxday.net so IE can figure out how to display the basic text there. But since the site can be easily read even in IE just by adjusting IE’s font size I haven’t made it a priority and now IE 7 will probably fix that for me by the end of the month. There’s more to the story, though. Bob replied to me today:

Hi Mark,

At your suggestion I loaded Firefox. I have been trying it all week. I bagan to notice that once in a while it loads a web site but then presents only a blank white screen. The problem can be cleared up, usually, by using the reload function. Most of the time that problem is frustrating and delaying. Today it did the blank screen problem while I was using Firefox to order some materials. It went blank when my order completion should have been presented. I tried “reload” and got a warning that I might be duplicating my order. Now I have no idea if I ordered one, two, or not.

My experience: when accessing commercial, for profit sites, IE works, Firefox does not.

Conclusion: Firefox is unacceptable. It fails to present proper screens at critical times. Firefox results in expensive failures that cost time and money.

I’m sure you web programmers hate MS. Everyone hates the big guy on the block. But unless the others can operate reliably they just aren’t acceptable for commercial transactions.

Thanks

Bob

I understand Bob’s position but I’m quite certain he doesn’t understand mine, or care for that matter. Not that he should. He makes his point well and in doing so, perfectly illustrates the reality of the situation that I find so frustrating. His position is not unreasonable but I think it’s a bit misguided. I’ll address that in the next post.

The short preview is this: I don’t hate Microsoft because they’re “the big guy on the block.” I hate them because they universally suck at everything but cannot be ignored.

Buckle up. I had my periodic anti-Microsoft rant started and saved as a draft before I even got Bob’s most recent email.

I finally got off my perfectionism and decided to just get something done here even if it wasn’t the greatest thing that ever hit the blog world.

After all this time, I wonder if anyone but the spammers will even notice. I’m not telling anyone. I’m gonna wait a while and see if there are any comments.

The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

I haven’t been blogging much over the last couple of months for a couple of reasons. Initially, it was because I was just too busy and in transitions that made net access inconvenient. Now that things have settled, I have decided that it’s time to clean up around here, so to speak.

I’m about 60% finished with a complete blog redesign. I’ve already upgraded my test mirror to Word Press 2.0. I’m finishing up the new layout and tweaking the configuration a bit to add some new functionality. If all goes well, this blog will be reborn by the end of the week.

I also intend to adjust the content a bit to get back to what this blog used to be when it started. That will most certainly be a real improvement, so stay tuned.